A curious absense james boswell mm iss23

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A CURIOUS ABSENCE The Documentary Art of James Boswell PART ONE:

An

ADVERTISEMENT FOR

A CURIOUS ABSENCE BEING A DISCURSION ON THE MERITS OF:

MR. JAMES BOSWELL Esq.

INCLUDING

MANY IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATIONS ON

THE NATURE OF HIS ART AND CRAFT

BY

MITCHELL MILLER

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lasdair Gray’s Book of Prefaces can be YRHIVWXSSH EW XLI HI½RMXMZI WXEXIQIRX SJ XLI notion of literature as a dialogue between past ERH TVIWIRX SRI XLEX LEW HI½RIH QYGL SJ 7GSXXMWL literature of over three decades. As with any anthology there is that initial temptation for the bored-cumcurious is to establish the ins and the outs – that is, who does and does not make the team. James Boswell does not. No reason is given for this curious absence. Certainly, one could hardly say Boswell didn’t write prefaces – his output is a long, rambling series of foreword(s) to that elusive greatness he sought all his life and only found in his Great Book of Johnson. His apologia for the Tour of the Hebrides is a masterclass in the form, while the ‘Advertisement’ Gray uses as a preamble to the book is very similar (though much more self-effacing) to the promotional material used by Boswell for the Life of Johnson, to (in that very lawyerly manner) state the case for the magnanimity of his opus. Each of Boswell’s works – journals, biographies and travelogue – is prefaced by some sort of apologia, some schematic that links his literary endeavours to his own fruitless quest for selfimprovement, self-advancement and most cherished of all, paternal approval.

Boswell’s best preface incidentally, was the dedication written to himself in the otherwise dreary Ode to Tragedy: I make no doubt, Sir, but you consider me as your very good friend; although some people – and those, too, not destitute of wisdom – will not scruple to insinuate the contrary. In the LoJ Boswell makes great play of the dialogue between men of letters, and not just in reported speech but the written record too. As a man – or at least, a literary presence – we get the strong impression that he was formed of the conversations he had – and that his form could literally alter from one conversation to the next. Johnson does make it in the BoP for his Dictionary (glossed by the editor) and he never mentions Boswell either (but then Johnson’s writings on Boswell could hardly be called reciprocal, limited to a slight, bland sketch in The Journey to the Western Isles). Gray gives us many of Boswell’s contemporaries (some of them friends) – MacPherson, Smollett, Sterne – but not the Bozzy who eary-wigged on so many of their conversations.

Take for example, the preface to his London Journal: ‌ A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner or person he is’. I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal of which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable. It will give me a habit of application and improve me in expression; and knowing that I am forced to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions to do better. And therefore in a sense, Boswell was a precursor to this notion of literature as a conversation that escapes all temporal constraints – though it was in many respects a conversation with himself, the elder Boswell examining the younger, probably with many a shiver of embarrassment – only the UN Security Council could compete with Boswell when it came to failed resolutions. (His descendants were also involved in XLI GLEX SRP] XS JEQSYWP] WXMGO XLIMV ½RKIVW MR XLIMV ears and insist they couldn’t hear him.)

While The Dictionary is of course, a major landmark in the development of the English Language and thus an essential inclusion in Gray’s survey, the LoJ has a claim XS GSQTEVEFPI WMKRM½GERGI EW ER MRRSZEXMSR MR PMXIVEV] GYPXYVI +MZIR XLEX MX MW EVKYEFP] XLI QSWX WMKRM½GERX contribution by a Scottish author to the shape and form of modern literature, arguably the greatest modern work by a Scot until Gray himself published Lanark, it leaves a bit of a hole were it to be entirely ignored. But here I’m being entirely partial, identifying too much with the style of my subject, and letting my ardour get the better of me. To cool off then, let us also consider the linguistic interest in Boswell, who was of that second generation SJ 7GSXW EXXIQTXMRK XS žYWL Âł7GSXXMGMWQW´ JVSQ XLIMV nibs. David Hume gave us some interesting quotations on Scotticisms, but Boswell is in himself, strong testament to the secular cult of elocution that swept Scotland where Scots clamoured to adopt English grammar so that they might – from their point of view – better engage in a literary dialogue. GRAY. ‘[A] conversation across boundaries of nation, century and language.’1

1 HUME, BOSWELL AND SCOTTICISMS Hume famously lamented in correspondence his ‘misfortune to write in the language of the most VWXSLG DQG IDFWLRXV EDUEDULDQV LQ WKH ZRUOG +H ZDV QHYHUWKHOHVV RQH RI WKH Ă€UVW H[DPSOHV RI WKH ROG 6FRWV FOLFKp RI WKLQNLQJ LQ 6FRWV DQG ZULWLQJ LQ English. Hume is described as studying English almost as laboriously as if it were entirely a foreign tongue. According to Johnson, he never got the hang of it, and structured his sentences as if he were writing in French. The Cham did not approve. The effort to learn English was a common cultural H[SHULHQFH DPRQJ FHUWDLQ FODVVHV VRPHWKLQJ RI D ULWH RI SDVVDJH IRU D \RXQJ PDQ RQ WKH PDNH 7KH /RQGRQ -RXUQDO GHPRQVWUDWHG KRZ HQGXULQJ DQ LPSUHVVLRQ LW PDGH RQ %RVZHOO¡V JHQHUDWLRQ 2QH RI %RVZHOO¡V Ă€UVW FRQWDFWV LQ WKH PHWURSROLV LV WKH HORFXWLRQ OHFWXUHU 6KHULGDQ VHH IRRWQRWH DQG %RVZHOO PDNHV PDQ\ VXEVHTXHQW UHIHUHQFHV WR (QJOLVK WXLWLRQ WKURXJKRXW KLV ZULWLQJV +H ZDV DUJXDEO\ PXFK PRUH VXFFHVVIXO LQ SXUJLQJ KLV VW\OH WKDQ +XPH ² SHUKDSV UHĂ HFWLYH RI D JUDGXDO JHQHUDWLRQDO VKLIW" -RKQVRQ ODWHU ZLHOGHG WKH KDQGEDJ LQ D Ă€QDO FRXS GH JUkFH %26:(// Âś'DYLG +XPH KDG PDGH D VKRUW FROOHFWLRQ RI 6FRWWLFLVPV¡ -2+1621 Âś, ZRQGHU WKDW KH VKRXOG Ă€QG WKHP ¡

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So is it that Gray simply doesn’t want Boswell in his club (a feeling with which Boswell would have been very familiar post-the-publication of the LoJ after he offended so many acquaintances ‌) – or are we assigning anger and malice in place of perfectly reasonable editorial decisions or considerations of space? Is Boswell simply a victim of the cutting room žSSV GYVPMRK YT EPSRKWMHI 7LIVMHER ERH +SPHWQMXL# Was Gray refused copyright by the Skull ’n’ Bone Guardians of Boswelliana?2 Or does he concur with the traditional view of Bozzy as a mere stenographer to the Doc, so that if you already have Johnson speaking in his own voice, what need for a Boswell? It’s Gray’s book, it does very well without a Boswell (or several other writers) and it being a work of anthology as art rather than science, who is and isn’t selected is none of my business. Furthermore, the LoJ is in many respects a proto-Book of Prefaces in its capacity as ‘A view of literature and literary men in Great Britain for near Half a Century ‌’ so perhaps the two had best maintain separate orbits. But let’s imagine for a minute this omission says something about the home country’s feelings towards this particular writer; if Boswell has been summarily disgraced and dismissed from the canon of post-industrial Scottish civic modernist literature that Gray is so indelibly associated with (or post-modernist, if you prefer) it would hardly be Gray who tore off the epaulets and banjaxed his quill. ‘Scottish literature’ has a tendency to ignore Boswell. Is it because the English so readily lay claim to him (and thus, in the eyes of so many, taint him)? Having said that, Boswell has been recognised as part SJ E HMWXMRGXMZI XVEHMXMSR SJ ÂłRSR ½GXMSR´ [MXLMR 7GSXXMWL Literature. Here Kurt Wittig in his The Scottish Tradition in Literature (1958) considers Blind Harry’s Wallace: If Barbour’s Bruce, with its essentially historical interest in the hero, foreshadows the great Scottish biographies of Boswell and Lockhart, this narrative account of Scotland’s great popular hero Wallace, compiled a hundred years later, with its delight in semi-

½GXMXMSYW HVEQEXMG ITMWSHIW MXW WIRWI SJ character and picturesque situation, taps the vein of Walter Scott. But it wasn’t just Scott who tapped the vein of GLEVEGXIV SV WIQM ½GXMXMSYW HVEQEXMG ITMWSHIW % FVSEHIV YRHIVWXERHMRK SJ &SW[IPP´W ÂłRSR ½GXMSR´ WLS[W that what was once commonly regarded as artless stenography3 can now be understood as a process of dramatisation and literary creation. No-one knew Boswell better than the American scholar Frederick Pottle, who comes only second to Edmund Malone as a helpmeet to Boswell’s posterity. His analysis of the London Journal elegantly sums up Boswell’s artistic contribution: POTTLE. ‘[I]f it is lifelike and dramatic, it does not get there by a mere mechanical process of rote memory. It got that way because Boswell was a great imaginative artist – the peer in imagination of Scott and Dickens.’ A READER. ‘What? Haven’t you read his attempts at poetry? His bloody awful playscripts?’ POTTLE. ‘Not in invention; in the creation SJ ½GXMSRW LI MW RSX EX EPP remarkable. And of course a lack of invention is a limitation. ‌ When a man by similar exercise of the imagination presents us with dramatic HMEPSKYIW ½PPIH [MXL [MX ERH wisdom which we know he was constructing with the aid of memory, wit and wisdom which we know he could not have invented, we feel that he deserves a lower kind of praise.’ And therein lies the problem of James Boswell. It did not help that he was also a confused, deracinated Anglophile (though this aspect has been a little exaggerated), he a Tory (though a somewhat mercurial one, better versed in the rubrics than the theory), and intermittently imperialist in sentiment. His character, so minutely and obsessively observed in his journals, ERH WS [MPPMRKP] WEGVM½GIH SJ MXW HMKRMX] MR XLI GEYWI of writing a better biography in LoJ has been more a millstone for Boswell than almost any other writer – up to and including fascists, Stalinist lapdogs and snitches, damned as – EDMUND WILSON. ‘A vain and pushing diarist.’ - and while not absented from the accepted canon of Scot-Lit, its claim on him is, for reasons that go beyond these baseline political

2%26:(// DQG <$/( 'XH WR D YHU\ FRPSOLFDWHG VHULHV RI SHUHJULQDWLRQV DQG LQVWDQFHV RI OLWHUDU\ VNXOGXJJHU\ WKH EXON RI %RVZHOO¡V SDSHUV QRZ UHVLGH DW <DOH ELOOHW RI WKH PRVW GLVWLQJXLVKHG %RVZHOO VFKRODU )UHGHULFN 3RWWOH %26:(// 7+( :,7/(66 67(12*5$3+(5 LV WKH PRVW HQGXULQJ DQG SRZHUIXO RI WKH P\WKV DERXW %RVZHOO 7KH JHQLXV EHKLQG WKLV FRQYHQWLRQ ZDV 7KRPDV 0DFDXOD\ ZKRVH FHOHEUDWHG HVVD\ RQ WKH /R- FHPHQWHG WKH QRWLRQ WKDW %RVZHOO FRXOG RQO\ ZULWH KLV JUHDW ERRN EHFDXVH KH ZDV D IRRO %XW LI 0DFDXOD\ FHPHQWHG WKH QRWLRQ KH ZDVQ¡W WKH Ă€UVW WR UDLVH LW 0UV 7KUDOH SOD\HG D PDMRU UROH LQ SURSDJDWLQJ WKLV QRWLRQ LQ KHU ERRN DQG RWKHUV such as Fanny Burney painted the picture of the sycophantic Boswell registering each and every the picture of the sycophantic Boswell registering each and every word.

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HMWUYEPM½IVW VIPYGXERX -X MW XVYI XLEX (EZMH (EMGLIW wrote a sensitive and perceptive biography of the biographer, but it does seem the way that as with his own family, Scottish literature has taken on the role SJ XLI žMRX] 0SVH %YGLMRPIGO MR JIIPMRK E GLVSRMG WIRWI of embarrassment over a son noteworthy for all the wrong reasons. AUCHINLECK/THE PITHY PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND. ‘Could he not be just a bit more HMKRM½IH# % &MX QSVI HSYV# (SIW LI VIEPP] RIIH XS practice his animal impersonations in publick?’ Since his father the judge judged him, Boswell has spent much of his posthumous career being regarded as, at best, an idiot, at worst, a shallow parasite, an automatic writer – as Arnold Kemp puts it in his review of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, Adam Sisman’s short but robust assessment of Boswell’s career: /)14 Âł4SWXIVMX] EX ½VWX QSGOIH &SW[IPP EW E FYJJSSR and lickspittle who, by some unaccountable accident, managed to write a great book.’ ;I [MPP GSQI FEGO XS XLEX TVIWIRXP] FYX ½VWX MX WLSYPH be established that Boswell has also become a very Caledonian term of abuse, invoked by Ian Bell while in the process of giving Andrew O’Hagan, another famous Ayrshire expat, a literary doin’ in the Scottish Review of Books last year. O’Hagan’s response was measured, thoughtful and generously, concerned with defending not himself but Boswell: BELL.’[O’Hagan] has the Boswell itch: can’t much be bothered with Caledonia, can’t leave it alone.’ O’HAGAN. (Emerging from the doorway) ‘Scotland wasn’t an itch for Bozzy, it was a realm of duty. He had a rather too large sense of all that – of his father, of the Law, of his ancestors – and it hampered his essentially free nature. As we see from his Journals, Boswell had pride in Scotland, but he knew he was more himself walking up the Strand.’ O’Hagan should know this sort of argument cuts no ice in the cold north. But truth be told, Boswell is more often ignored than upbraided. I personally, have come across no pronouncement by MacDiarmid on Boswell (who [SYPH ½X EHQMVEFP] XLI QSYPH SJ 7GSXXMWL )GGIRXVMG though given the aforementioned efforts to wipe out his Scotticisms and his adoration of those touring voice coaches such as Thomas Sheridan4 who rounded the Scottish province teaching the Jocks to speak proper, would his words be friendly?

Also marked on the charge sheet is Boswell’s defection to Anglicanism and his unashamed preference for the Great Satan London noted by O’Hagan (which he did not conveniently externalise as all that was bad and rotten in Edinburgh Ă la Stevenson in Jekyll and Hyde, but took on its own terms). Then, worst of all perhaps, there is his, for want of a better word, softness. Boswell is podgy, spongy, wobbly, chubby, yielding in both a real, intellectual and an artistic sense. He lacks all the granite edges crucial to the self-image of the more pompous sections of the modern, masculinist Scottish literati dominant for much of the 20th century. He had a ZIV] HI½GMIRX WIRWI SJ PEGSRMG HITSVXQIRX FIMRK frivolous, blathering and overly-proud of those animal impressions. He was an unashamed sensualist enjoying, so he tells us in the London Journals, bathing his feet in milk water. He was physically soft and double-chinned and had enormous culinary and sexual appetites. 8LMW MW LEVHP] E HMWUYEPM½IV ÂŻ 7GSXPERH LEW MXW JEX writers and Burns’ libido titillates the blazered multitudes who administer his cult, dirks poised over yet another steamed pudden. But Burns had QYWGPIW WGYPTXIH F] LSYVW EX XLI TPSYKL WYJ½GMIRX XS JER XLI žEQIW SJ PEXIRX HIRMIH LSQSIVSXMG LIVS worship that bonds so many Scotlit depts thegither – and was born in a cottage, not the big house at Auchinleck. Boswell’s candidacy and his foibles have, until this era of more complicated masculinity been unpalatable to many. That this wobble-bottomed, softsoled sensuality greatly annoyed the sensibilities of Boswell senior (whose buttocks we can be sure, were hardened and polished by many years on the bench) is one of the enduring sources of vicarious entertainment in Boswell’s many journals, but it again puts the basic Scottish literary position on &SW[IPP ½VQP] MR (EHH]´W GLEMV gavel in one hand, carving knife in the other. And again, there is no easy separation of writer from the work. The LoJ embodies this; it is a fat, glutton’s book that even to the last print run (and its author’s last gasp) struggled to ingest every morsel on its subject. He wrote journals in such copious amounts not so much because he had something to say, but because he constantly felt the need to examine himself and what he was going to become (often the pleasure

4%26:(// DQG 7+( ,5,6+ PXVW VXUHO\ IRUP WKH WLWOH RI D IXWXUH ERRN RQ %R]]\¡V PXOWLSOH ,ULVK FRQQHFWLRQV )HOORZ *ODVJRZ 8QGHUJUDG Francis Gentleman and Sheridan were but some of the earliest; most profound and important was Edmond Malone, the editor whose SXJQDFLRXVQHVV WHQDFLW\ DQG SDWLHQFH KDYH DOPRVW DV PXFK WR GR ZLWK WKH H[LVWHQFH RI $ 7RXU WR WKH +HEULGHV DQG WKH /R- DV LWV DXWKRU 6KHULGDQ Ă€UVW PHW %RVZHOO ZKHQ OHFWXULQJ LQ (GLQEXUJK DQG JUHDWO\ HQFRXUDJHG KLV IDWHIXO $QJORSKLOLD %XUNH DQG %RVZHOO MRXVWHG UHJXODUO\ DW WKH /LWHUDU\ &OXE DQG HQGHG RQ EDG WHUPV *ROGVPLWK ZDV D IULHQG DQG D ULYDO DQG WKH H[DPSOH RI /DXUHQFH 6WHUQH VKDSHG %RVZHOO¡V VW\OH /DVW QRW EXW OHDVW WKH HGLĂ€FH RI 0DODKLGH &DVWOH ORRPV LQWR YLHZ ZKHUH WKH %RVZHOOLDQ WURYH RI SDSHUV OD\ LQ ZDLW IRU IXWXUH JHQHUDWLRQV

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in Boswell comes from reading his thoughts on absolutely nothing of consequence). His output is fat – concision was not a Boswellian gift – though the style is economical, clean and has a wonderful sense of moment and movement. This gives his corpulent tomes a sense of hippo-in-the-swimming pool lightness and is no mean achievement. To mix zoological metaphors even more unwisely, &SW[IPP [EW E XI\XFSSO MRXIPPIGXYEP FYXXIVž] ,I GSYPH think, and occasionally exercised said capacity but only a fool should look for consistency in his thought beyond a basic gut-level landowner Toryism tempered by his hopeless romanticism. That Boswell was able to ingratiate himself with Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Johnson, Burke and the Corsicans so readily, and within any apparent contradiction makes it very clear he was an OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Disciple. He was really in search of a father substitute, which Johnson could serve as, though he also pestered Lord Eglinton, Sheridan, Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, various toffs, Rousseau and Voltaire for guidance. Pottle notes of the London Journal that Boswell substituted his father’s brooding authority for a penurious scheme of budgeting. Rousseau would have made an interesting mentor, given the two men shared a penchant for baring their souls on paper. They also shared a desire for a better father, a more authentic guiding authority, a search for what Derrida termed Supplimentality (On Grammatology). Focusing on the Confessions, Derrida looks to the ‘Maman’ sequences where a young Rousseau summons the spirit of the mother½KYVI LIVWIPJ E WYFWXMXYXI JSV LMW VIEP QSXLIV F] WRMJ½RK LIV TMPPS[ FIHWLIIXW ERH WLSIW# SV IZIR swallows her uneaten food, whether absent or not. This, according to Derrida, creates an inescapable text of supplements layered upon other supplements that can become preferable to the real thing – even when that real thing is within reach, because it can never be truly possessed or controlled. His creation of Johnson in the LoJ certainly takes us into these realms, a supplement of a supplement, created on

Bozzy’s writing desk after each evening with the Doc. BOSWELL. ‘While his sayings are read, let his manner be taken along with them.’ His description of Johnson in the Tour of the Hebrides as a ‘planetary body’ neatly sums up the relationship between the two men, with Boswell the rogue moon TIVMSHMGEPP] WMRKIH F] E WSPEV žEVI 7YGL WYFQMWWMSR to an English planet rankles Scottish vanities – the machismo of the Scot promulgated by MacDiarmid in A Drunk Man MW ½VQP] TPERIXSMH MR REXYVI WSVI SJ elbow but steadily and resolutely central to his own process of coming to terms with existence and the backwash of a hauf bottle. Boswell – at least on the surface – was never able to be this sort of a man. He always had to refer his ideas through others, or, more subtly, arrive at them through his assiduous documentation of the people who surrounded him. A BOSWELL DESCENDANT (with considerable insight). ‘[H]e preferred being a showman to setting up a shop of his own.’ But Boswell’s critics could concoct no vitriol to surpass that he splashed all over himself. BOSWELL.

6YIJYP Âł8LIVI MW ER MQTIVJIGXMSR E WYTIV½GMEPRIWW MR all my notions. I understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size. I wonder really if it be possible for me to acquire any one part of knowledge fully.’ Soaking in his acid bath, Boswell foresaw the weaknesses that would leave his work open to attack via his personal, rather than their literary qualities, as has been the case for over 200 years. Personally, I like the man, at times love him, and greatly admire the artist he is increasingly recognised to have been. Whatever his faults, Boswell is an amiable buffoon; even at his worst he is endearing, except in the case of his wrong-headed and inexcusable support for slavery (which hasn’t aided his application to the Socially Democratic Scots Literary Canon), although this is more complex than many have suggested.5

5%26:(// DQG 6/$9(5< ,Q KLV -RXUQDO %RVZHOO JLYHV PDQ\ FRQWUDGLFWRU\ RSLQLRQV RQ WKH VXEMHFW %26:(// Âś$ERXW WKLV WLPH , ZURWH to Johnson, giving him an account of the decision of the Negro Cause, by the Court of Session, which by those who hold even the mildest and best UHJXODWHG VODYHU\ LQ DERPLQDWLRQ RI ZKLFK QXPEHU , GR QRW KHVLWDWH WR GHFODUH WKDW , DP RQH VKRXOG EH UHPHPEHUHG ZLWK KLJK UHVSHFW DQG WR WKH credit of Scotland.’ This was the celebrated Joseph Knight case, an African slave who had been purchased in Jamaica and then brought to Scotland. Knight VXFFHVVIXOO\ WRRN KLV FDVH WR FRXUW WR VHFXUH KLV IUHHGRP XQGHU 6FRWWLVK ODZ $QG \HW RQO\ D PRQWK EHIRUH %RVZHOO FRPSODLQHG DW WKH FUXHOW\ LQYROYHG LQ DEROLVKLQJ D SUDFWLFH VDQFWLRQHG ÂśE\ *RG LQ DOO DJHV¡ %26:(// Âś>,@W ZRXOG EH H[WUHPH FUXHOW\ WR WKH $IULFDQ 6DYDJHV D SRUWLRQ RI whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish that trade would be to shut the gates of mercy on PDQNLQG ¡ In short, Mr Boswell vacillated, and would continue to do so until the publication of the puerile and embarrassing No Abolition of Slavery in 1791. There is no cause to doubt his sincerity in either of these instances, nor the cordiality he displayed to Johnson’s servant, the freed slave )UDQFLV %DUEHU %RVZHOO KDV EHHQ DOO EXW DFFXVHG E\ WKH DFDGHPLF -DPHV %DVNHU RI GHVWUR\LQJ WKH Ă€UVW $EROLWLRQ %LOO E\ PDOLFLRXVO\ ZLWKKROGLQJ Johnson’s opposition to slavery in the LoJ, thus depriving the Abolitionists of valuable propaganda. This grossly overestimates the standing Boswell had in British public life. %RVZHOO DFTXLUHG IURP -RKQVRQ DQ DEKRUUHQFH RI ÂśVDYDJHU\¡ DQG IHOW LW WR EH D IRUP RI PLVHU\ ZRUVH WKDQ DOO RWKHUV ² DQG VR VODYHU\ FRXOG EH FRPSUHKHQGHG E\ WKRVH ZLOOLQJ WR EH EOLQGHG DV D PHFKDQLVP RI UHVFXH FLYLOLVHG WKUDOGRP DV D OHVVHU RU WZR LOOV $V D FRQĂ€UPHG VRIW WRXFK LW LV KDUG WR EHOLHYH KLV VXSSRUW IRU VODYHU\ ZRXOG KDYH ZHDWKHUHG DQ\ GLUHFW H[SHULHQFH RI LWV UHDOLWLHV ² EXW DOO WKH VDPH 1R $EROLWLRQ ULJKWO\ VWDLQV Boswell’s reputation and it is hard to muster any enthusiasm to defend him on this point.

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Adam Sisman makes a fairly strong case to show that the dire No Abolition of Slavery was probably an excruciatingly bad topical allegory of love and the passions; it demonstrates Boswell’s shallowness of mind and idiocy, not his cruelty. Boswell was, for sure, a capital T Twit, but he was never half the Twit his detractors – and he himself – made Boswell out to be. Part of the problem may be the comparison he himself invited between himself and Johnson through such close association; next to Johnson, Boswell does seem intellectually TYR] WYFWIVZMIRX ERH MRWMKRM½GERX %W WLS[R MR The Journey to the Western Isles and the Tour of the Hebrides, Johnson’s was a scholarly intellect and Boswell’s a literary one, formed in the very moment he committed words to paper. Boswell needed the supplement of grammar, participle, measure and meter to give his thoughts shape and therefore, some degree of substance, whereas Johnson tries – and occasionally fails – to commit his substance to paper. In The Journey Johnson crams Scotland into Schiller’s museum in a tour de force of topography, anthropology and what would today be called cultural criticism. The Tour possesses almost none of these virtues. It has instead, appropriately enough for its title, a sense of space, lightness and movement, of the moment and of the people who appear in its pages. Despite Boswell’s oft-stated intentions to emulate Johnson’s approach to literature it in reality seems very different, and it may be telling when Johnson and Boswell dispute the importance of measure in poetry in the LoJ, it is the latter who is most absolute in his views of the need for form.

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